Introduction

To address the current state of CCS costs, a workshop was convened in March 2011 at which an international group of experts from industrial firms, government agencies, universities, and environmental organizations met to share information and perspectives on CCS costs for electric power plants [2]. A major conclusion of that workshop was that there are significant differences and inconsistencies in the way CCS costs are currently calculated and reported by various authors and organizations. As a consequence, there is a significant degree of confusion, misunderstanding, and mis-representation of CCS costs in the information now available publicly. These inconsistencies hamper the ability to correctly and systematically compare the cost of different carbon capture options. They also distort comparisons between CCS and other greenhouse gas reduction measures—with potential consequences for both technology and policy developments.

A key recommendation of the 2011 workshop was that a task force be formed to develop guidelines and recommendations for a costing method and nomenclature that could be broadly adopted to produce more consistent and transparent cost estimates for CCS applied to electric power plants. A seven-member task force was constituted in October 2011 to undertake that effort. This White Paper is the result of the task force deliberations to date. It incorporates comments from participants at a second CCS Cost Workshop held in April 2012 [3], where the findings

Recommendations

This paper represents an international effort to harmonize the methods used to estimate and report the cost of carbon capture and storage systems at fossil fuel power plants. It recommends guidelines and procedures for CCS costing, encompassing the full chain of CCS processes including the cost impacts of any CO2 utilization for enhanced oil recovery that results in long-term sequestration of captured CO2. While the focus of this paper is on costing methods applicable to power plants and electric utility organizations, much of the material also applies to other industrial applications of CCS.

It should be noted that this report is not intended to suggest or recommend a uniform set of assumptions or premises for CCS cost estimates. Indeed, there are good reasons why the cost of a given technology may vary from one situation to another and from one location to another. Rather, the sole objective is to help all parties with an interest or stake in CCS costing do a better job by addressing the major deficiencies in current costing methods, especially differences in the items included in a cost analysis.

This paper has shown that there are significant differences in the methods currently used by different organizations to estimate the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems for fossil fuel power plants. Many of these differences are not readily apparent in publicly reported CCS cost estimates, and the existence of such differences hampers rather than helps efforts to properly assess CCS costs and their relationship to other greenhouse gas control measures. Given the international importance of CCS as an option for climate change mitigation, efforts to systematize and improve the estimation and communication of CCS costs are thus especially urgent and timely. The CCS Costing Methods Task Force was formed to address this challenge, bringing together an international group of experts from industry, government and academia.